Last week, Milwaukee lost a talented, dedicated, hard-working historian.

But when former Italian Community Center president Mario Carini died on July 7, at the age of 78, Milwaukee’s Italian community lost much more. It lost a force of nature.

Mario Carini was a community leader, a long-time Festa Italiana volunteer, a compelling personality in Milwaukee, and especially in the Italian-American community.

But more than anything, Mario was the living memory of Milwaukee’s Italians, who will celebrate Festa Italiana without him for the first time ever this week.

He wrote more than anyone about the history of a community in which he was born and raised – in books and in countless columns in The Italian Times newspaper. He knew the names and the faces and places and the dates because he lived in those places, during many of those dates, alongside many of those people.

But Mario didn’t rest on his laurels nor rely on his memory. He also spent, surely, tens of thousands of hours, digging through archives. He compiled lists of every Italian in every Milwaukee city directory, for examples. He parsed his data by neighborhoods, by people’s trades, by their military service.

When I first met him, around 1990 or ‘91, he showed me the Italian Milwaukee museum that was the attic of his East Side house, packed with mutual aid society banners and badges, newspapers, documents, photographs and more – a veritable treasure trove.

Enter the Italian Community Center and you'll see the walls nearly papered with historical photos of Italian Milwaukee. Mario is the man behind nearly every one of those photos, if not every single one.

He collected them, he copied them, he framed them and he hung them. He did the same at Festa year after year, where for decades he coordinated the photography exhibit and the adjacent sacred art exhibit.

He maintained an astonishing collection of images in plastic tubs in a room across from the bocce courts at the ICC, and he sometimes rotated photos in and out. He shared them with authors local and national, who were interested, and who frequently used the photos in their books.

He collaborated on films about Milwaukee’s Italians, most recently the MPTV special that ran alongside a national Italian-American history miniseries.

Though some of us have explored and written about aspects of the history of Italians in Milwaukee, no one has done a modicum of what Mario did to preserve the tradition of his parents and those of the Italians of Milwaukee, especially those in the Third Ward.

When I frequently bugged him for information on the Rev. August Giuliani and his Protestant mission in the Third Ward, I think Mario was skeptical of my motives. Giuliani, after all, was a divisive figure.

But when he realized I was serious and I was seeking to capture an important, if not always viewed as positive, facet of life in Italian-American communities not just in Milwaukee, but across the country, he softened, and he opened his photo bins and scoured them for related images. He shared his memories. He suggested knowledgeable folks (all off the top of his head, of course, because he carried darn near everything he’d ever researched and learned up there in his head).

Mario could be argumentative. He could be manic. He could be particular. He could be extremely protective of his archive and the ICC. But it was always because he was passionate and because the ICC and Italian-American Milwaukee were not abstract concepts to Mario. They were his life.